I don't know much about them but isn't that what ghosting is all about? You can get programs that will create an exact replica of the hard drive, registry included, so that you can just copy it straight to another machine. I think it burns it to discs and then you can use them as many times as you like - as far as I'm aware anyway.
GHOST stands for General Hardware Oriented Software Transfer by the way.
It's just you might hit registry problems if you try to copy each individual folder manually.